Wikia Grabs Grub, Distributed Web Crawler

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Wikia’s Co-Founder, Jimmy Wales takes a step further towards his vision of the LAMP stack for search, by acquiring Grub, the original visionary distributed search project. Wikia then releases Grub into open source and is now available for testing and downloading.

Wales was excited to announce the positive responses to the acquisition of Grub, during a keynote address:

The desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open source and businesses. Look for other exciting announcements in the coming months as we collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box.”

Michael Grubb, Senior Vice President, Technology, and Chief Technology Officer of LookSmart, owner of Grub has this to say about the acquisition deal:

We are pleased to collaborate with Wikia and believe that Grub will thrive under an open source license. We are happy to be able to assist in the movement to make search a more open proposition and look forward to seeing things progress from here.

With Grub now in open source, search technology experts would have a better hand on its development into full blown user-contributed collaborative and open search system.

Arnold Zafra writes daily on the announcements by Google, Ask.com, Yahoo & MSN along with how these announcements effect web publishers. He is currently building three niche blogs covering iPad News, Google Android Phones and E-Book Readers.

5 thoughts on “Wikia Grabs Grub, Distributed Web Crawler”

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Company Information:

Targ8.com was founded in December 2006 and launched a custom search engine based on Google’s co-op custom search engine technology. Targ8 has now created multiple co-op custom search engines directories, populated these databases and created direct links into popular websites that have searchable databases.

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